Valentino Rossi, analysing the negative trend

As is the case for every successful sportsperson, Valentino Rossi has entered the down phase of his career. But few expected such a drop in his performance. And we’re not just talking about the two recent Qatar weekends, during which he scored just four points, a pittance for a rider who has amassed more than 6300 world championship points.

Even more striking was the fact he finished the Doha GP qualifying in penultimate position, a new low for the Doctor. Any other time he was forced to start from the back row, it was always due to a penalty.

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The data

If we look at the data, things really started to go downhill last November. Up until the French GP on 11th October, his performance had been fairly good. He finished 8th in first practice at Le Mans, then 7th in 3rd practice, 4th in FP4, 10th in qualifying and 12th in both second practice and warm up. He then crashed a few metres into the race, but this is one of the pitfalls of racing, particularly in the wet.

Then on 15 October, after undergoing countless anti-Covid tests since July, he tested positive to the virus, forced to watch the Aragón races from his sofa. Back for the European GP, he only rode from Saturday, after leaving his M1 to Garrett Gerloff, called in to replace him. He didn’t make too bad a start, 8th in FP3, albeit nine tenths behind team-mate Maverick Viñales. But it was all an illusion, because in the next session he was 14th, then 18th in qualifying and 19th in warm-up, before failing to finish the race due to an electrical problem.

The drop

If we include that weekend, the first of the two at Valencia, Rossi has completed five races since having coronavirus, for a total of 33 sessions. But in none of these did he finish in the top three, scoring a best of 4th in the Qatar GP qualifying, after receiving a tow from Pecco Bagnaia’s Ducati, which was his only top-seven finish. Even if we widen the results to top-ten finishes, there are only five results to speak of. And in three sessions, he’s had to settle for 21st place, namely in second practice in Portugal, where only Kallio finished behind him, and in fourth practice and Q1 in the Doha GP, where he preceded only Lorenzo Savadori on the Aprilia.

He’s also set 20th on a couple of occasions, in third practice at Portimao ahead of Kallio and the Ducati of Tito Rabat and in the warm-up of the inaugural 2021 race, beating only Jack Miller and Savadori. In addition to this are two 19th places, three 18th places, five 17th places and three 16th place finishes, as well as the already mentiond DNF at the European GP. If every session were to award points to the top 15, as is the case in the race, Rossi would have scored nineteen “zeros” in 33 outings on track. In the actual races, he’s reached the points zone three times, finishing 12th each time, for an average of 2.4 points over the five races.

So far less than the 16 points he scored with just one podium finish at last year’s Andalusia GP, a result he then came close to matching with 4th at Misano and two fifth-places at Brno and in Austria. But aside from these race results, Valentino was also performing better across all of a weekend's sessions during the first three months of last season. In the 63 sessions completed over the first nine GP weekends in 2020, he closed inside the top fifteen on 55 occasions. In addition, he scored just one 20th place and no 21st place finish, and neither was he ever 19th or 18th.

All figures that seem to suggest Valentino is a different person since coronavirus. But knowing his determination and talent, a turnaround seems inevitable, also because, although Rossi claims he’s now riding for fun, for the 42-year old, having fun will never just mean taking part.

Translated by Heather Watson

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